Rounding

Proving the common saying that region trumps party in Pennsylvania politics, a pair of Republican state representatives are proposing a severance tax on natural gas production in the Marcellus Shale.

In a challenge that could have repercussions in small towns across Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale, Range Resources on Tuesday filed an appeal of South Fayette Township’s ban on drilling in conservation areas and all residential zones, including suburban communities and rural farmland.

It is becoming impossible to ignore the Bakken Shale in North Dakota as an oil play that may be at the center of a domestic upswing in U.S. production, according to a report released Wednesday by the Washington, DC-based Energy Policy Research Foundation Inc. (EPRINC).

Rounding out the flip-flopping action of the week, cash points unanimously plunged on Friday ahead of the weekend as moderating weather and Thursday’s hardy natural gas storage report made it very difficult to argue that the supply-demand equation is anywhere close to being balanced.

UK-based Centrica plc is rounding up more than 850,000 Texas customers after agreeing to purchase two retail electric providers (REPs) of American Electric Power (AEP). The deal, which includes power supply and service agreements, adds customers of Corpus Christi-based CPL Retail Energy and WTU Retail Energy, based in Abilene. When the transaction is completed, Centrica will have nearly 4.5 million customers in Canada and the United States, making it the largest deregulated energy services company in North America.